nvention, of which he was inordinately proud.
Some two or three hundred traitors, men, women, and children, tied
securely together with ropes in great, human bundles and thrown upon a
barge in the middle of the river: the barge with a hole in her bottom!
not too large! only sufficient to cause her to sink slowly, very slowly,
in sight of the crowd of delighted spectators.

The cries of the women and children, and even of the men, as they felt
the waters rising and gradually enveloping them, as they felt themselves
powerless even for a fruitless struggle, had proved most exhilarating,
so Citizen Collot declared, to the hearts of the true patriots of Lyons.

Thus the discussion continued.

This was the era when every man had but one desire, that of outdoing
others in ferocity and brutality, and but one care, that of saving his
own head by threatening that of his neighbour.

The great duel between the Titanic leaders of these turbulent parties,
the conflict between hot-headed Danton on the one side and cold-blooded
Robespierre on the other, had only just begun; the great, all-devouring
monsters had dug their claws into one another, but the issue of the
combat was still at stake.

Neither of these two giants had taken part in these deliberations anent
the new religion and the new goddess. Danton gave signs now and then
of the greatest impatience, and muttered something about a new form of
tyranny, a new kind of oppression.

On the left, Robespierre in immaculate sea-green coat and carefully
gauffered linen was quietly polishing the nails of his right hand
against the palm of his left.

But nothing escaped him of what was going on. His ferocious egoism, his
unbounded ambition was even now calculating what advantages to himself
might accrue from this idea of the new religion and of the National
fete, what personal aggrandisement he could derive therefrom.

The matter outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen and
calculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to place
him--Robespierre--on a yet higher and more unassailable pinnacle.

Surrounded by those who hated him, those who envied and those who feared
him, he ruled over them all by the strength of his own cold-blooded
savagery, by the resistless power of his merciless cruelty.

He cared about nobody but himself, about nothing but his own exaltation:
every action of his career, since he gave up his small practice in a
quiet provincial